How To Do In A Post-Strike World: How I Met Your Mother and Lost
By fred | February 26, 2008
The writers’ strike was a tough moment, for everyone. It was long and hard. (That’s what she said!) But now it is over, and everyone is going back to work. But after all this time and the new situation everyone finds themselves in, it may take a while to adjust back.
Recently, scribes from different shows talked, in their own words, about what it was like, to be back at work for the first time after too many months. Let’s focus on a couple of favorites of mine, and many others I’m sure. Two very different shows, two worlds, but both awesome in their own unique way.
Starting with a brilliant and quite hilarious piece coming from one of the creative brains behind the awesome show that is How I Met Your Mother.
If there’s a reason we all love this one, let me assure you that it’s all in there.
Who can remember a thing after three months? Not this exec producer.
by Carter Bays
On our first day back at work, once the pleasantries are over (How was everyone’s strike? What should we order for lunch?), my writing staff and I find ourselves where we left off in November: trying to come up with great ideas. But who wants to do that? It’s so much easier to have already come up with great ideas. And for that, we cast our hopeful gazes upon the dry-erase boards.
Before the strike, as we stuffed boxes of pens and reams of paper into the trunks of our cars willy-nilly, we forgot to erase some of the dry-erase boards in our writers’ room. Now, those boards bear the hieroglyphics of our last brainstorms before the walkout. There are titles up there for proposed episodes, like “The Goat” and “For A Limited Time Only.” At some point we found these ideas so exceptional that we got up from our chairs and wrote them on the wall. But here we are three months later, and I can’t remember what any of it means.
I’m reminded of that old tale about Keith Richards waking up in the middle of the night, writing the opening riff to “Satisfaction,” recording it on his bedside tape recorder, and going back to sleep, only to forget about it the next morning. It wasn’t until he played back the tape weeks, maybe months later that he discovered the song he would be playing to stadiums for the next 150 years. Which gives me hope: Wouldn’t it be great if How I Met Your Mother’s “Satisfaction” were up there, fleshed out and completely forgotten ?
On one of the boards, I see the words “Twenty More Minutes.” It’s my handwriting. What could I have meant by “Twenty More Minutes” ? Was that an episode title ? The punchline to a joke ? A pithy editorial, that our jobs amount to nothing more than filling network airtime ? And then I remember, “Twenty More Minutes” was a story idea: Lily gets drunk, funny stuff happens, there’s a sweet moment at the end. If written right, maybe it’s a “Tumbling Dice.” Maybe even a “Start Me Up.”
But it’s no “Satisfaction.” I erase the boards. We’re going to have to come up with new ideas after all. The big corporations may have been a worthy adversary during the strike, but we now face our true enemy: the blank dry-erase board. And as usual, I can’t think of anything. But I try. And I try. And I try. And I try.
Posted in News
Shows: Brothers & Sisters, How I Met Your Mother, Lost, Medium, Two And A Half Men, Ugly Betty
